BUILDING TOWNS AND NEIGHBORHOODS:

LEARNING FROM TRADITIONAL MEDITERRANEAN URBANISM.

Top Left: A street in Aibar, a town 22 miles south-east of Pamplona in northern Spain. Photo by Bernard Rudofsky fromArchitecture Without Architects (1965). Top Center: City Place, West Palm Beach, FL. Photo by Charles C. Bohl, fromPlace Making (2002) Top Right: Haile Village Center, Gainesville, FL. Middle Right: Floridian Arcade. Photos by Charles C. Bohl, from Place Making (2002). The three color photos show ideas from ancient codes in use in recent developments.Bottom Left: Projections over streets: no information about the artist or the location is available for the sketch, however it is most likely a representation of a street in old Izmir, Turkey in the 19th century. Bottom Right: Main Street in Rosemary Beach, Florida, which was established in 1995. The town is located 8 miles east of Seaside between Panama City and Fort Walton Beach on Route 30A which runs along the coast from Destin to Panama City Beach. Photo taken on July 30, 2003, courtesy of Karen Moore.

The goal of this web site is to provide information for understanding and learning from the history and theory of traditional urbanism of major cultures which have built cities, towns, and villages around the Mediterranean basin since antiquity to the early decades of the 20th century.

Today the traditional human habitat around the Mediterranean basin exhibits sophisticated livable qualities as it is evident in the proximity of uses to each other, spatial and built form attributes which are admired by the large number of tourists from around the world and the United States who visit numerous Mediterranean towns to experience those qualities. We can recreate, without copying, those wonderful human scale, spatial, and built form attributes in our contemporary and future neighborhoods, towns, and cities if we are willing to understand, learn, and creatively apply the lessons. – Besim S. Hakim, 02/17/2003